File:SB-04-207-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Humane Countryman and the Adder. A man in a broad hat raises a club and recoils from an adder at left, while a dog stands beside a fireplace at right. Two figures lie in front of the fire; pots and utensils hang above. The figures, snake, dog, fireplace, utensils, complete printed frame, title, fable text and moral match the scrapbook illustration. The museum photograph shows a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. Its outer mounting-paper outline is excluded, while the complete inner printed frame is retained.

A printed cutting catalogued by Cooper Hewitt as 1878, illustrated by Frederick Stuart Church. The same composition is confirmed in G. Washington Æsop's Fables (New York: The World, 35 Park Row, 1878), printed p.23. The book title is dated 1878 and its copyright notice 1877. The catalogue status is Research in Progress; the catalogue date does not establish the first publication. The engraver is not securely identified here.

Compared directly with H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 4, page 207, item 5. The scrapbook image, handwriting, notes and transcription remain a separate witness. This matching composition does not identify the physical copy used for the scrapbook cutting.

Source

Natural-colour photograph supplied by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, accession 1938-57-1070-203, exact media CHSDM-57291_01-000001. Credit line: Bequest of Erskine Hewitt. Medium in the official record: Printed in black ink on paper.

• Museum object record.
• Persistent object identifier.
• Persistent identifier of this exact media view.
• Complete public image-delivery JPEG used for this crop.
• Larger high-resolution JPEG advertised in the official metadata, 4515 × 5439 pixels; not used for this file.
• Matching Fables, 1878, printed p.23.

Thank you to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for preserving this material and freely providing its photographs and Open Access metadata.

File and processing

PNG, 994 × 1619 pixels, RGB. Complete source JPEG used: 3320 × 4000 pixels, 691925 bytes, SHA-256 d53c78ed0f6ac5f2c7f1d965bac7fed6a240d0af134ba5b67d7205ceab5de0c9. The source actually obtained is the museum’s public image-delivery JPEG. It is the provider’s 4000-pixel-long-edge representation, not the larger advertised 4515×5439 master. The full photograph’s dimensions do not describe the resolution of the small pasted illustration.

Illustration crop (940, 935)–(1970, 2590). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.413171 degrees clockwise, measured from the long printed picture-frame bottom rule. Final trim (18, 18)–(1012, 1637); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete relevant composition, inner printed frame, title and text where present, and meaningful source marks are retained. The outer mounting-paper outline is excluded. Original paper colour, show-through and scan artefacts remain. No enlargement, colour or tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. PNG compression is lossless; the source itself is JPEG. The complete source is linked above.

Rights

The saved official Smithsonian Open Access record, captured on 29 October 2026, specifies CC0 for this exact media view and its metadata. The underlying nineteenth-century printed illustration is public-domain historical material. The attribution, accession and credit line are retained above.